Tom Hiddleston sat down and gave us an EXCLUSIVE insight into his portrayal of Hank Williams in the upcoming new release, I Saw the Light.

Hiddleston is known to give extremely committed performances, and doesn’t shy away from any type of role. Whether it is as Loki in The Avengers, a vampire in Only Lovers Left Alive, or F. Scott Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris, Hiddleston is an incredibly diverse actor and one of the best of his generation.

In I Saw the Light, Hiddleston takes on the real life country legend Hank Williams, a man whose successful life was overshadowed by darkness, as he was unhappy in his marriage, and turned to adultery and alcoholism.

So how does Hiddleston play these dark roles without letting the negativity linger with him? That’s the big question in this exclusive interview with the actor. Watch below to see how Hiddleston copes with the difficulties of being an actor, and his experience of making I Saw the Light.

Review from Empire Magazine, since the movie is coming out on the UK this weekend.

Neurologist Dr. Laing (Hiddleston) moves into a pristine tower block in the shiny 1970s, only to see the new society crumble into age-old violence. ★★★★

While J.G. Ballard is seven years gone, and the source for this film 40 years old, it still feels alarmingly now. The future he imagined in the 1970s, with its affluenza and anger, couldn’t feel more relevant today.

Ballard’s book was published in the year Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party, before the Winter Of Discontent saw rubbish rotting on British streets amid industrial disputes, before greed became nakedly good. But the novel seemed to foresee all that was to come, and the first of the many smart decisions in this pungent adaptation is to maintain its period setting. It must have been tempting to modernise it. But as ridiculous as the cars, lapels and shagpile sideburns are, retaining the novel’s era grants High-Rise a compelling air of tragedy. The people in this tower block are buying a bit of the future, but they’re never going to escape the past.

Although designed to be exciting and people-friendly, the brutalist architecture of post-War regeneration came to represent ugly failure. High-Rise captures the excitement of that sleek, new way of living, and then takes malicious delight in its destruction. This film is both beautiful and grubby; it bathes your eyes but leaves a sticky residue. From the ethereal elegance of an aristocratic French fancy-dress party (costumes wrapped around warped souls), to the lithe musculature of a naked Hiddleston, to the striking image of his paint-splattered face — as if Dulux made an STD commercial — it is crammed with dreamlike (or at times nightmarish) moments. The chilly eroticism is familiar from producer Jeremy Thomas’ other Ballard adaptation, Crash, but this is more anarchic than Cronenberg’s controversial cult classic.

This is a strength and weakness. By staying so faithful to the material, screenwriter Amy Jump and director Ben Wheatley capture its spirit without quite making High-Rise consistently gripping as a story. Once we are firmly established with the concrete erection and its dubious denizens, incident upon incident of unpleasantness pile up to become almost monotonous. But it’s hard to know how one could wrestle Ballard’s book into a conventional thriller without losing the jagged edge that buries it in the mind. And Wheatley and DP Laurie Rose conjure such restless, arresting images that even if your attention to the plot wanders, you will still want to watch.

Wheatley doesn’t allow the larger scale — this must be his biggest-budget picture by millions — to blunt the unpredictability and energy he showed in Kill List et al. Hiddleston, highest-profile star yet, manages a very tricky balancing act, as the cool observer drawn deeper — or higher — into mayhem, while Sienna Miller’s seductive aide and Luke Evans’ bolshy filmmaker are wonderfully unrepentant. This is a dazzling, troubling, ugly and unsettling film. Ballardian, then: fucked up and up and up.

Finally, someone has found a way to adapt JG Ballard successfully for the cinema. Until now he was better suited to providing excellent band names (Comsat Angels) or grim song titles (Atrocity Exhibition) for 1970s-80s post-punk bands. Ballard’s work defiantly resists adaptation. He is an obsessive and an imagist. He doesn’t do plot, he just examines his nightmarish scenarios and mentally collapsing protagonists from every conceivable angle, rather than offering neatly structured climaxes. His dialogue is functional. In conventional outer space sci-fi you can have fun with spaceships, ray-guns and special effects, but Ballard’s “inner space” is far harder to capture.

Why JG Ballard’s High-Rise takes dystopian science fiction to a new level
Read more
High-Rise, the most outwardly conventional of Ballard’s 70s steel-and-glass novels, has famously been a property in development ever since it was published, attracting and defeating numerous adapters. Too many of these involved screenwriters superimposing their own ideas upon Ballard’s scenario and killing its internal balance. Ben Wheatley and his partner-editor-scenarist Amy Jump, however, have made several decisions that honour both the novel of 1975 and the cinematic needs of 2016. Firstly, they set the movie in its original period, the mid-70s, in the aftermath of Ernő Goldfinger, the Ronan Point collapse, brutalism and the sorrowful postwar migration from backstreet slums to suburbs in the sky. They have not unnecessarily filled in Ballard’s vacant characters, instead allowing the collective psychosis that grips the high-rise to remain the film’s protagonist. As a handyman puts it: “I don’t work for you, I work for the building.”

he pair also understand that Ballard was, first and foremost, a sublime imagist and they pack every frame with their own audacious pictorialism. Much of it partakes freely of the great British movies of the period, an age of big, mad projects financed by the last US studio money then remaining in Britain. Think of Ken Russell at his Tommy/Lisztomania high tide, or Nicolas Roeg’s menacing reds. Recall the queasy insanity of Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital; Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange; or those psycho-house movies that bookend the 1960s, The Servant and Performance. And, at a distance, remember Cronenberg’s contemporaneous Shivers (1975), filmed in Montreal’s minatory Nuns’ Island apartment complex, designed by Mies van der Rohe; or the Gropiusstadt of 60s Berlin, which gave us both Christiane F and Bowie’s Neuköln. And, oh yes, Pasolini’s The 120 Days Of Sodom, just for good measure.

A single viewing of High-Rise does not let it settle quietly in the mind. I expect to mine it 10 more times. For now, I know this: in Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump, 21st-century Britain has found its postmodern Powell and Pressburger.

The much-anticipated Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light is set for release later this month, but Taste of Country fans are getting an early look inside the creative process from lead actor Tom Hiddleston and musical director Rodney Crowell in this exclusive clip.
I Saw the Light is based on the 1994 Williams biography by Colin Escott, George Merritt and William MacEwen. Hiddleston plays the brilliant, doomed singer, and Elizabeth Olsen stars as Williams’ first wife, Audrey. Bradley Whitford stars as music publisher and songwriter Fred Rose, Davis Krumholz plays New York journalist James Dolan and Cherry Jones portrays Williams’ mother, Lillie Skipper.
Written and directed by Marc Abraham, I Saw the Light focuses on the years between Williams’ marriage to Audrey and his death on New Year’s Day in 1953 at the age of 29, chronicling both his massively influential musical career and tortured private life. Hiddleston has been the subject of much advance critical praise for his sharply-drawn portrayal. He says Crowell really helped him gain insight into how to play the country legend by giving him a key piece of advice.
“I remember asking him, ‘What do I need to do to? I’ve got four months to get myself ready for this. These are big boots. What do I need to do?’” Hiddleston recalls in the clip above.
“And Rodney says, ‘Before you do anything else — before you think about sounding like Hank, playing like Hank — learn the songs. And learn them for yourself. Find out what they mean to you.’ Essentially just to invest myself in the meaning of those songs, and then come see him again in a few months’ time, and Rodney would work on modulating tone and rhythm. But initially, the simple work was actually just to mean it … because that was the only way I think I was ever gonna translate the power of his music to people.”
I Saw the Light is slated to open on March 25. Take a look at a clip from the film, and see stills from the production below.

Set at the dawn of time, when prehistoric creatures and woolly mammoths roamed the earth, Early Man tells the story of Dug, along with sidekick Hognob as they unite his tribe against a mighty enemy Lord Nooth and his Bronze Age City to save their home.

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